--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. A brother and sister were pulled out of a collapsed building in northwest Syria yesterday. The girl, who looks to be about six or seven, had reportedly said to a rescue worker, get me out of here, I'll do anything for you. And that rescue worker delivered. In fact, the girl's whole family survived.
--:-- Noelle King: The death toll from that 7.8 magnitude earthquake and its aftershocks that hit Turkey and Syria has risen to 11,600. And that number is being updated every few hours. Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, declared a three-month state of emergency, saying he believes Turkish people will exhibit patience. But after all this, it's unclear how much patience they have.
--:-- Noelle King: Meanwhile, in northwest Syria, there's little government to even speak of. Up next, two reporters join us from the region to tell us what they're seeing.
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--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: Yes, my name is Pyotr Zalewski, and I'm the Economist's Turkey correspondent. Where are you right now, Pyotr?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: I'm on the outskirts of Antakya, which is a city of about 400,000 people in southern Turkey, close to the Mediterranean coast.
--:-- Noelle King: Pyotr Zalewski sounded almost stunned by what he'd seen in Antakya. When we talked, it was Tuesday evening there, and he'd returned to the outskirts of that city.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: I've just come out of the city center, where the situation is quite grim. I mean, it's quite grim on the outskirts as well. I don't have the official numbers or exact numbers, but I can tell you that it seems as if every other building in the city, or at least in the city center, has been completely destroyed.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: There are other buildings that are leaning to one side or another and look to be on the verge of collapsing, which is one reason why no one wants to go back into his or her house. So people are camping out outdoors. There are tent cities sprouting up all over the local parks. Some people will be sleeping in their cars.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: But the devastation is quite extreme, and the rescue workers here are overwhelmed and overstretched. What's the weather like?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: It's not freezing, but it's getting quite cold. It's cloudy. There's also a cloud of smoke over the city, and that's a cloud of smoke from Iskanderon, which is another town about an hour away from here.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And there we were driving by and we saw a port that was being consumed by fire. And it's the smoke from that fire that's spreading over the neighboring mountains and over Antakya itself. But inside the city, the scenes are quite apocalyptic.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: People are being pulled from the rubble. But by people, I unfortunately mean corpses mostly. There are some survivors, there are some miracles, but the situation for the most part is quite hopeless.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: So much so that you have bodies wrapped in blankets or rugs lining the main thoroughfare. Those are corpses waiting to be picked up by emergency crews. And there are also wounded people in the streets waiting for ambulances.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: As you can hear probably in the background, there are quite a few ambulances here. Military helicopters as well. President Erdogan, the Turkish president, declared a state of emergency in the 10 provinces most affected by the earthquake.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: So obviously military is starting to pour in. It's been now almost two days, I guess, 36 hours or so since the quake. And so any hope of finding survivors is quickly diminishing, also because there simply isn't enough equipment and enough manpower to cope with the scale of the disaster.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: I imagine people are in shock. What are people saying to you? What are they telling you?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: Well, you know, I mean, you have people who are obviously undergoing severe anguish. Everyone has a relative, seems to have a relative they can't get a hold of.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: You know, social media in Turkey is full of tweets and the like by people in Antakya, in places like Antakya, who are trapped in the rubble and asking for help. And there's a sense of, you know, frustration, exasperation, because folks are realizing that the rescue workers simply will not get to more than a fraction of the people who are trapped under the rubble.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: Can you tell me why was this earthquake so deadly?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: This is a part of the world that is frequently hit by earthquakes. And I might imagine that there would be preparations for this kind of thing but you saying in Antakya it looks to you like every second building has collapsed.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: What's going on Pyotr? One reason is obviously the fact that Antakya sits atop a fault line that stretches for hundreds of kilometers to the east and the And the devastation along that fault line, along that 500 kilometer belt, is extreme.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And it's also extreme south of that belt in northern Syria. And there obviously the humanitarian situation is even more dramatic because access for rescue workers is much more restricted.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: So the scale of these earthquakes also explains the extent of the damage, at least somewhat. But what also explains the extent of the damage is the quality of the housing.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: A lot of the houses that have collapsed, probably the vast majority are houses that were built in the 80s and 90s. And that were built in plain disregard of building codes that were not adequately earthquake proofed.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And, you know, the Erdogan government has actually done sort of a half-decent job of earthquake-proofing houses across Turkey. They claim to have renewed some 3 million, more than 3 million housing units.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: But that's only a fraction of the total housing stock. And what has made things worse actually is a decision by this government to offer what's called building amnesty to people who are developers who built illegally over the past few years.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And clearly, this government will have to answer for these building amnesties. But there's no shortage of people who will be or ought to be taken into account, starting from previous governments who also passed building amnesties to generations of developers who built on the cheap and who built illegally.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: This is one of those events that has obviously drawn the attention of much of the world. What is the international response? Who is helping? Who's really standing out at this time?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: I mean, I've seen, you know, television footage of rescue teams arriving from Japan, for example. I understand help is pouring in from a number of countries.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: I haven't seen any international foreign rescue teams in Antakya. The problem is that a lot of locals in Antakya haven't seen Turkish teams either.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And so the effort is, at least as far as they see it, inadequate. And the resources that the state here has at its disposal are seen to be inadequate as well.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: Just to give you an idea of, you know, some of the scenes unfolding here, I saw an elderly woman pleading with some soldiers to clear the rubble of her son's house.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: She said she knew that her son was inside, but he couldn't be heard from. And so the soldiers explained to her that they have to make difficult choices. They have to prioritize the heavy equipment that they have.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: The diggers, the cranes, they only use in those areas, those buildings where there's hope of finding survivors. And they said that across the street was another building where they could hear the voices of people trapped under the rubble.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And they explained to her that her son was probably dead. They tried to help by removing the rubble with their hands, but this was a two- or perhaps three-story house.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: There's only so much they could do. The bulk of the rescue effort has been done by locals and by volunteers. And people also, you know, flying in and driving in from other parts of the country.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: The outpouring of sympathy and support by normal Turks has been quite extraordinary as well.
--:-- Noelle King: This earthquake is a tragedy in which untold numbers of lives will be lost. On top of that, the economy will be hit hard. There is almost no way around that.
--:-- Noelle King: And then on top of that, Recep Tayyip Erdogan is facing an election in May. Historically in Turkey, when there is an event of this nature, and you point to the quake in 1999, have people tended to blame the government and to vote out the person in charge?
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: Well, people won't blame the government for the earthquake. They will blame the government for the inadequate response.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And that was certainly the case in the late 90s and 99, when the earthquake struck near Istanbul. People felt at the time, and rightly so, that the earthquake response was wholly botched.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: And a common theme during that 99 earthquake was, you know, where is the state? Turks have been taught for decades that their state, the land, was there to protect them.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: They have been taught to admire the power of the state and in 1999 the state was nowhere to be seen. Now, today the situation has changed and this government has actually taken some steps to improve the emergency response.
--:-- Pyotr Zalewski: But it seems to be that the consensus is that the government has not done enough. And it probably will have to shoulder part of the blame.
--:-- Noelle King: And that's going to hurt Erdogan's chances of re-election. And it's obviously going to make it much harder for the ruling party to win come May.
--:-- Noelle King: So there's almost certain to be a backlash. Backlash How big that backlash ends up being obviously depends on the ongoing rescue effort.
--:-- Noelle King: And perhaps it to really talk about reconstruction but at least prospects for reconstruction The focus right now is on the search and rescue effort and clearing the rubble, looking for survivors.
--:-- Noelle King: And even 36 hours after the quake, there are people being pulled out alive. As far as housing people who have been rendered homeless by this, You know, a lot of folks depend, will depend on friends and relatives in other parts of the country.
--:-- Noelle King: Social networks in Turkey are remarkably strong and resilient. So people from places like Antakya will be able, or at least many of them, will be able to find shelter with friends or family elsewhere.
--:-- Noelle King: Many of the hotels here seem to have opened their doors to people displaced by the quake. I've seen libraries converted into temporary shelters, mosques, and schools.
--:-- Noelle King: And there are obviously tent cities, you know, tents sprouting up all over the countryside here.
--:-- Noelle King: From Antakya, where Pyotr is, a video is going around of rescue workers giving a stuck but still smiling little boy sips of water from a bottle cap.
--:-- Noelle King: The boy is reportedly Syrian, and there are a lot of Syrians in Turkey, of course, as a result of that country's civil war. Coming up next, what this quake did in and to Syria.
--:-- Noelle King: Support for Today Explained comes from Built Rewards. These days, it seems like everybody has a rewards program. You swipe your card and you get one cent on the hundred dollars.
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--:-- Noelle King: That's J-O-I-N-B-I-L-T dot com slash explained. We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen. So now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better.
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--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. We're back. Earlier this week in Idlib, Northwest Syria, a crowd gathered and cheered as an entire family was pulled from a house, alive.
--:-- Noelle King: Three little kids, two girls and a boy were extracted first. The kids looked really stunned, but the rescue workers were loud and jubilant. And later their parents were removed on stretchers to more very loud cheering.
--:-- Noelle King: Sarah Dadoush is a Washington Post correspondent based in Beirut, Lebanon. That's where we reached her. Sarah is also Syrian, and she told us that northwest Syria, where that family was rescued, is unfortunately in much worse shape than even Turkey.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So the earthquake that devastated Turkey and Syria also struck both government-held parts of Syria and rebel-controlled areas in the northwest. It left destruction in its path, but the Syrians, both in government-held areas and in the northwest, especially in the northwest, suffer from already compounding crises and a lack of funds and abilities to respond to such an emergency.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So we're seeing people hit in north and central Syria. What is life like for Syrians who are living in the Northwest, the rebel-held Northwest?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So the rebel-held Northwest has really kind of been battered by bombardment, battles, brutal humanitarian conditions with no end in sight.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: There's not enough medical facilities and not enough doctors. There hasn't been for years. Bombardment by the Syrian government's forces and their Russian allies has kind of pancaked a lot of medical centers and a lot of buildings.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: It's really, really affected the structural integrity of buildings. All of this was made worse by the earthquake.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: How are people living in those areas? You know, people talk about refugee camps. What does that look like? Are people in buildings? Are they in tents? How might we, you know, envision this area?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So out of the maybe 4.5 million people living in the Northwest in that opposition-held enclave, The UN estimates about 3 million people were displaced from elsewhere in Syria.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Many had been displaced several times over. Some displaced people here have been uprooted several times, and starting over has become routine.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: And many say they need international support now if they're to cope with the dire conditions they live in.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: For years, people have been living in tents, you know, among olive groves and on hard, very hard terrain, exposed to the elements, exposed to the rain and snow and cold.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: And a lot of the people who don't live in tents are forced to live in already damaged infrastructure. So that northwest corner was really not ready for a disaster like this.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: We spoke to a reporter in Turkey earlier in the show, and we could hear ambulances behind him. You know, it was evident, even though he said Turks do not have everything they need, they do have some of the things they need.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: What does the recovery look like? What is it expected to look like in northwest Syria? If people are already kind of living at a bare minimum, who is helping? Who is available to help?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: I think the overwhelming sense in the northwest of Syria right now is that no one cares about northwest Syria You know that the impression that residents have because there really is a state that can govern There is a pseudo state there but none not one that has funds It doesn't have enough ambulances.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: It doesn't have the ability to dispatch firefighters or rescue workers. The rescue workers that exist there are the Syrian civil defense or what people call the white helmets.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: And they're made up of members and volunteers. It's an aid group that operates in areas outside of government control.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Our teams responded to all the sites and the buildings. And still now, many families now are under the rubble. Our team's trying to save them. But it's a very difficult task for us.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: We need help. We need the international community to do something to help us, to support us. The weight of this has relied on them. And they're the ones who have been pulling bodies and pulling people and trying to rescue everyone.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: This group has support from the UK government and other areas, but it has been saying it's not enough for years. Bombardment happened as recently as this past month.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: The war has not ended in this area, which needs food, water, shelter, medical assistance on a regular basis, let alone after a disaster.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Presumably, Sarah, the Syrian government cannot do anything in this region because it does not have any control in this region?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: I don't think the Syrian government would want to do anything. Western Lepo, neighbors Idlib province, the last major areas held by rebels.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: They and vast numbers of civilians are cornered there by President Bashar al-Assad's forces and their allies.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: The reason so many people have been displaced to that area, to the northwest, is because the Syrian government, whenever it recaptured areas, it filled up these green buses with rebel fighters and everyone that they deemed a traitor, which at the time would be pretty much anyone who was left in those rebel-held areas before being taken.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So they just piled them onto buses and sent them to the northwest. It's supposed to be abandoned. This is on purpose from the Syrian government.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: So the Syrian government also doesn't really have enough means to deal with not just the crisis, but it's normal economic woes as it is.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: What are the options then for the people living in this area? What can they do? Can they go elsewhere, I guess, is the question.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: No, the people living there can't go elsewhere. I think many have been trying for a long time. People with special permissions, sometimes people who work in specific organizations, are able to move into the south of Turkey, where a lot of Syrian refugees live.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: But mostly these IDPs, these internally displaced people, don't really have a place to go. So they're just at this point just trying to find a place to sleep.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Some of those who did manage to escape unharmed are now braving the cold, living on the streets of Aleppo. They're afraid to go home.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: You saw how a whole building just falls. It is terrifying. It's not as if mortars hit here or there. Here you walk in the streets. Ambulances are everywhere. Buildings are falling. People are walking in the streets. There are bodies.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Is aid on its way there to northwest Syria? Can aid get there? I mean, if this is an area where you say there's, you know, the prospect of violence in a normal time, what is it like trying to get help into northwest Syria?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Getting help into northwest Syria is very difficult. Everything that goes in has to be approved. There's a border crossing that the government allows for humanitarian aid to be sent in through.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Russia threatens to veto the renewal of this cross-border aid every six months. And now we're seeing the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs saying that damage rose and other devastation from the earthquake has forced the United Nations to stop deliveries from Turkey into northwest Syria.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Which means millions of people are going to face dire conditions because if roads are broken, others are inaccessible, There are logistical issues that the UN says it's facing right now.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: It honestly seems for people in northwest Syria like this is a plague. These people cannot win. They're already displaced from their homes. Many have lost people because of the war.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: They don't have any place to go. And then on top of that, this devastating earthquake. Yeah, it feels as if this area just keeps going back in time, I think, for its residents.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: You know, they lost electricity because of the war. Internet is not as readily available because they've been cut off water. As end of last year, we started seeing all of these cases of cholera that actually trickled into Lebanon because of contaminated water and sanitary practices.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: Shelter was scant and now even more so. So it just feels like they're being pulled further and further back into a worse time.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: What do you think that the next few days and weeks will look like in northwest Syria?
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: I think the effort to rescue people will not abate, not even for a few days, I think longer, because after the rescue effort takes on a more grim tone, and then it just becomes extraction efforts of all the different bodies.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: If the estimates are right, and if they think that there might be thousands of bodies under the rubble, then this could just be a very, very tiring and exhausting traumatic time for a place that's already been traumatized many, many, many times over.
--:-- Sarah Dadoush: There's just a constant plea for any kind of support. So maybe something will come out of that.
--:-- Noelle King: That was Sarah Dadouch with The Washington Post in Beirut. We were also joined by Pyotr Zalevsky from The Economist on the ground in Antakya in southern Turkey.
--:-- Noelle King: If you'd like to know how to best help Turkey in Syria, take a visit to Vox.com. My colleague Kelsey Piper has written The Challenge of Disaster Relief, an insightful article about what helps in these situations and what does not.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's episode was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette.
--:-- Noelle King: It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Robert Mouncey.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.
